The Best Sports Team in the World?
It is impossible to watch the United States Women’s National Soccer Team dominate Thailand 13-0 in the first round of the World Cup and believe that they should not receive equal pay as the men’s team. Watching Alex Morgan and Megan Rapinoe thunder down the field and then leap into each other’s arms beaming never gets old. However, the articles and tweets I saw following the game were not focused on how the winning margin was the largest in World Cup history, or about the display of breathtaking talent, but rather how the team was “celebrating too much” after each goal. A great deal of people thought that they should’ve gone easy on Thailand.
But why would a professional sports team “go easy” in the first game of the World Cup, a tournament that each woman has worked her entire life to play in and win? Should Alex Morgan only have smiled after her first goal, or her fifth? How are women supposed to behave when they succeed? The World Cup game was the perfect example of how women succeed, and women dominate, in fact, but when the boundaries are pushed too much, they are seen as too domineering.
These reactions are a part of a larger culture that denies equality for women all over the world, and has forced the USWNT to sue for equal pay. They even debated boycotting the 2016 Olympics over this issue. The fact that the women’s team has to fight for equal pay, pay that the men’s team is receiving despite having only scored 13 World Cup goals in the past 6,202 days, is deplorable. Professional sports are not immune to the gender pay gap; the gap exists across the U.S. where Hispanic women make 53 cents on average to a white man’s dollar. Similarly, players on the USWNT receive as little as $99,000 year, while the men’s players earn $263,000 per year on average, but the men’s team did not even qualify for the World Cup last year. While the women’s team has already been paid over $90,000 each in bonuses for making it to the quarter finals, they would have made $550,000 each if they were men.
A common argument to justify the pay inequality is to claim that that the men’s team brings in more revenue for U.S. Soccer, and thus should be paid more. However, that is no longer true. The women’s team simply brings in more money. Furthermore, that trend is expected to continue, with the USWNT bringing in more money from ticket sales alone.
The USWNT will continue to prove over and over again that they are the best women’s soccer team in the world and that they deserve, at a minimum, equal compensation as their male counterparts. They have beaten Thailand, Sweden, Chile, and Spain, and France. Until then, their biggest battle will be the fight for equal pay.